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Sunday, December 27, 2009

Moshpit Tragedy records- the future of labels?

Question: With all this talk of free music downloading taking over, what do you think of Moshpit Tragedy records stance, the first label to offer all their music as free music? From: PhilNeal444@gmail.com

Answer: Yeah its very interesting model, but I dunno about if its going to burn down the industry! We spoke to Moshpit Tragedy's mainman Rayny Forster in 2008 when he was looking to find a larger label to take his project under his wing, or even to buy him out. Rayny is a super smart guy who has that great ability of self-promotion, and will no doubt be pretty successful in any endeavour. His choice of bands are cool too- hes a punk/crust/grind fan, so you can get Extreme Noise Terror or Phobia and about 20 more punk/crust albums - all for free download from his site Moshpit Tragedy.

Oh- you can also pay for them too- he has sliding scale of payment option, tho he confided to us that the majority of fans take the free option, which is fair enough.

Recently he announced - proudly- that all his releases will be download-only, no physical product. I applaud his conviction, because if we tried that with our bands, there would be a riot, as there is nothing our band members covet more seeing their album in their own hands, as a nice lavish Cd or vinyl edition of their work.

Rayny has a great promotional angle and decent taste in music, if he can persuade some biggish bands to join him then it could really spell trouble for the regular music industry.

1 comment:

I also went the 'free' way with my band and in the last 3 weeks we had over 300 downloads. There's no way we could sell 300 CD in 3 weeks so for us, a non-touring band, it's a perfect match. We do not need the income from sales or touring so the more people listening to our music the better. We still sell tshirts, limited editions of CD and LP and manage to fund our activities that way.

In case you're interested:www.thesyre.com

I guess a lot of bands and labels couldn't afford that but they should consider using their music as a way to sell something else to their fans. Reality is that people are ready to pay 50$ to attend a concert but will not give you 10$ for a CD!